What's with all the noise?

Fall is here and the leaves are turning golden or orange or red while falling to the ground in a crisp carpet.

This was the time to get out in the yard on Saturday and rake huge piles of these solar cells while your kids dove into the fall foliage and you talked to neighbors about the afternoon college football games. Raking leaves was a rite of passage to nature's care.

But now there are leaf blowers. Noisy machines that blow leaves (except for the wet ones) into piles and across the yard. Back and forth across the grass lawns, neighbors or in my neighborhood, landscapers or lawn maintenance workers don headphone sound protectors, strap on the plastic tubes with electric or gas motors and sweep the yards.

And because of the racket, the animals scurry away, the neighbors can not talk or sleep or concentrate, and the leaves just blow back.

But this is the new reality (yes, I even have one but I don't know where all the tubes are).

So have a NOISY fall and don't mind me as I pull the old metal pronged tool to pull the masses of decaying foliage to the curb for the city to vacuum next week. I may even feel it was a workout when I'm done.